In human-affected fire environments, assessing the influence of human activities on the spatial distribution of wildfire ignitions is of paramount importance for fire management planning. Previous studies have shown that roads have significant effects on fire ignition. However, since different land cover classes are subject to different levels of ignition risk, roads in different land cover classes may differently affect fire ignition. The aim of this paper is thus to assess the influence of roads on fire ignition in selected land cover classes subjected to different levels of anthropogenic pressure in Sardinia (Italy). Our results show that fires are preferentially ignited close to roads in all land cover classes. However, the influence of roads is much stronger in less impacted land uses, where the availability of human-induced ignitions highly depends on the accessibility networks. Our approach represents a first step towards the systematic integration of interacting fire ignition drivers such as roads and land cover into fire risk analysis.

Zhovty Vody city, located in south-central Ukraine, has long been an important center for the Ukrainian uranium and iron industries. Uranium and iron mining and processing activities during the Cold War resulted in poorly managed sources of radionuclides and heavy metals. Widespread groundwater and surface water contamination has occurred, which creates a significant risk to drinking water supplies. Hydrogeologic and geochemical conditions near large uranium mine tailings storage facility (TSF) were characterized to provide data to locate, design and install a permeable reactive barrier (PRB) to treat groundwater contaminated by leachate infiltrating from the TSF. The effectiveness of three different permeable reactive materials was investigated: zero-valent iron (ZVI) for reduction, sorption, and precipitation of redox-sensitive oxyanions; phosphate material to transform dissolved metals to less soluble phases; and organic carbon substrates to promote bioremediation processes. Batch and column experiments with Zhovty Vody site groundwater were conducted to evaluate reactivity of the materials. Reaction rates, residence time and comparison with site-specific clean-up standards were determined. Results of the study demonstrate the effectiveness of the use of the PRB for ground water protection near uranium mine TSF. The greatest decrease was obtained using ZVI-based reactive media and the combined media of ZVI/phosphate/organic carbon combinations.

Question: Several mechanisms have been proposed that control the spatio-temporal pattern of species coexistence. Among others, the species pool hypothesis states that the large-scale species pool is an important factor in controlling small-scale species richness through filtering of species that can persist within a species assemblage on the basis of their tolerance of the abiotic environment. Because of the process of environmental filtering, co-occurring species that experience similar environmental conditions are likely to be more taxonomically similar than ecologically distant species. This is because, due to the conservatism of many species traits during evolutionary diversification, the ability of species to colonize the same ecological space is thought to depend at least partially on their taxonomic similarity. The question for this study is: Under the assumption of trait conservatism, does environmental filtering lead to nonrandom species assemblages with respect to their taxonomic structure? Methods: The significance of taxonomic filtering in regulating species coexistence is tested using data from 15 local species assemblages from the urban flora of Rome ( Italy). To find out whether the taxonomic structure of the selected 'local' species assemblages was significantly different from random, we used a Monte Carlo simulation in which for each local species assemblage, the actual taxonomic diversity was compared to the taxonomic diversity of 1000 virtual species lists of the same size extracted at random from a larger 'regional' species pool. Results: We found that in most cases the local species assemblages have a higher degree of taxonomic similarity than would be expected by chance showing a phenomenon of 'species condensation' in a small number of higher-level taxa. Conclusions: Our observations support the species pool hypothesis and imply that environmental filtering is an important mechanism in shaping the taxonomic structure of species assemblages. Therefore, the incorporation of taxonomic diversity into landscape and community ecology may be beneficial for a better understanding of the processes that regulate species coexistence

The metals and industrial minerals contained in the tailings of mining and quarrying activities, can degrade natural environments as well as human health. The objective of this experimental work is the application of innovative and sustainable technologies for the treatment and exploitation of mining tailings from Romania. Within this approach, the recovery of high grade raw materials to be placed on the market is achieved and reduction of these wastes volume are achieved. The current study is focused on hydrometallurgical process for the recovery of gold. The innovative treatment chosen is the thiosulphate process that, compared with the conventional cyanide, has several advantages (e.g., it is more ecologically friendly and is not toxic to humans). The conventional cyanidation process shows operating limits in the case of auriferous refractory minerals, such as Romanian wastes, the object of the study. An important characteristic of thiosulphate leaching process it has the best selectivity towards gold; it does not attack the majority of the gangue mineral constituents. Gold extraction of 75% was obtained under ambient conditions of temperature. Moreover, the overall process achieved about 65–67% Au recovery, this being in line with the conventional cyanidation process. As these results are obtained by application of the thiosulfate process on a low gold content ore, they may be considered encouraging. The optimization of process parameters and operating conditions, should permit the best results in terms of process yields to be achieved.